Helping My Parents With Passkeys

Privacy Questions
1

Hotmail, Gmail, and Amazon have prompted my mom to save passkeys while logging in from her Fedora computer this week and now she’s asking me questions about how to use the passkey on her iPhone. I’ve been peripherally aware that passkeys are the new hotness for account security, but I’m only now being forced to crash-course myself and figure out how she’s being forced to implement them at home.

  • Does anyone know how/where Brave is storing passkeys on Fedora?

  • How would I export those keys if I ever need to upgrade her device?

  • Is it even possible to move iOS passkeys to a GrapheneOS device if I change out her phone?

  • Is there a more intelligent question I should be asking in this situation?

P.S. I’m still reading and researching these technologies but in the mean time, if someone is kind enough to answer my questions, I’d be most appreciative.

2

On macOS Brave stores this in the local keychain so I would assume on Fedora it’s in the keyring. I don’t run Fedora but surely the keyring has some export functionality.

3

The drawback of passkeys is that unless it’s stored in a tool that can be used on any device anytime - you can’t have it if it’s natively stored in a browser or a particular OS.

I recommend using password managers to store passkeys because it seems like you want to have the freedom to use it in several places. Both Bitwarden and Proton Pass work well. This way it remains independent and you have the freedom to access your sensitive info even if a device is lost or stolen or damaged. Make sure your password manager is unlocked when logging in to accounts or when the website prompts to save passkeys and the password manager should prompt you to save it safely and efficiently. Once saved, all credentials are obviously synced and you can now log into any account on any device where you have your password manager which is almost on any platform and device short of an Apple TV.

I would highly recommend not storing them natively on a single software on a particular OS if you can’t have it sync or export it elsewhere to use it elsewhere.

3 Likes
4

Thanks for this! I’ll look into the Brave docs to see if they call it out.

Going to give this a try someday to export the keyring.
gnome-keyring-daemon --export --export-dir=/path/to/export/location

5

Thanks! I’ve already got her using Bitwarden, but since she called me after the fact asking questions, I’m not sure where things got saved in the moment.

6

Make sure and teach her/explain that everything must be saved in Bitwarden. Will save her and your sanity in the long run.